The Best Racket in Tennis Is Noisy, Silly U.S. Open

I love the U.S. Open. It’s one of my favorite shows, because tennis players as a class kill me and tennis as a game is a world of its own.

It’s not a game, it’s a tantrum. I don’t think you can play it unless your teeth hurt or you had a bad lunch. No one ever looks as if he’s having any fun. It’s played by a whole bunch of guys named Sven and Lars and Jarryd, and girls who look as if they have lost their balloons but they already have their own line of perfume in the boutiques.

It has all its own rituals. For instance:

RACKETS’ RED GLARE--Ever notice the way a player studies his racket, as if it were a road map and he were lost, after every losing point? He stares at it, fingers it, glares at it, or looks sad. As if the racket lost the point. Betrayed him.

He looks as if he’s trying to make up his mind whether to keep it or not. You might have heard at your grandfather’s knee that it’s a poor workman who blames his tools but tennists never heard of it, or ignore it. They pretend to be studying the racket for breaks in the strings, but they’re really probably trying to compose themselves. John McEnroe takes no chances. When his racket fails him, he smashes it.

UNGHHAH!--Remember when they used to call wrestling the “grunt and groan” sport? Well, tennis has supplanted it. It’s doubtful if anyone ever heard Bill Tilden or Helen Wills Moody grunt (or groan), but today’s players sound as if they’re trying to lift pianos.

I don’t know how much of a strain it can be hitting a tennis ball, I should judge about like swatting a fly, but the players sound like guys competing in the clean-and-jerk in the Olympics or trying to hoist tires onto Greyhound buses.

If you closed your eyes when Monica Seles was on court and hitting a backhand, you would think from the squeals she was opening a whole bunch of wedding presents. Jose Canseco can hit a 5 1/2-ounce baseball 500 feet without even breathing hard, but Jimmy Connors has to grunt and strain like a weightlifter to hit a two-ounce tennis ball 45 feet. There are times when tennis matches sound like feeding time at a zoo.

LINE CALLS--There has never been a correct line call in the history of modern professional tennis. They have six-eight people stationed around the court, monitoring them, but to judge by the outbursts of the players, every single one of them is either astigmatic, myopic or blind.

You are called upon not only to impugn their eyesight but their ancestry. It is known as being a competitor. It should be known as being an intimidator. Ilie Nastase started it, but Connors and McEnroe raised it to an art form. Tennis officials take more abuse than scullery maids--or umpires or linesman in any other sport. They subscribe to the sports adage that nobody ever bought a ticket to see you umpire.

Chair abuse was unknown in amateur days. In fact, Tilden was known to swat a ball out to make up when an opponent was victimized by a bad call.

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK--Tennis fans jeer by--get this!--whistling between their teeth. They sound like the seven dwarfs. Whatever happened to the good old, belly-wrenching, 200-decibel Bronx cheer? The raspberry? The vicious, snarling abuse from 50,000 throats indicating you have incurred their displeasure?

You whistle to call your dog, or a cab. You whistle Dixie. You don’t whistle when the officials are picking on your poor little rich kids. You growl and roar in the time-honored, deep-throated, all-American boo! Anything else is chicken.

Can you imagine a Super Bowl crowd raising a high-pitched, dainty whistle when the zebras call back a New York Giant touchdown? Picture a Yankee Stadium crowd whistling at an ump who calls a home run by Don Mattingly a foul ball. Tennis fans sound like a bunch of canaries. Real fans boo.

THEY GET NO RESPECT--You can count on Andre Agassi, seeded No. 8, being ousted in straight sets by unseeded Aaron Krickstein, as happened Monday. Tennis is the last stand of Bolshevism. It has no respect for aristocracy.

A year ago, Stefan Edberg was the Wimbledon champion and had won three other championships and 21 consecutive matches when he came to the Open. He was eliminated in the first round by unseeded Alexander Volkov. Monica Seles, seeded No. 2, lasted one round before elimination by a nobody.

If you want to see the great players at the Open, you have to come early.

THE SCORING--Whatever happened to 1-2-3? A touchdown in football counts six points, a basket in basketball counts two. But tennis scoring is right out of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Why should one point be 15, two points be 30, three points be 40--and 40-40 be deuce? Where else would “love” be a big nothing? Even the “tiebreaker” is a miasma of two-point “must” increments that could, itself, go on all night.

The guy who wrote the tennis scoring must be the same guy who wrote the tax laws.

THE FOREIGN LEGION--Baseball has Dominicans all over the place, football has kickers from Cyprus but everybody else is named “Bubba.”

But tennis has more names that look as if they belong on Czars or in operas instead of athletes. There aren’t enough Americans in the seed for a bridge game. You got a Boris (Becker), an Ivan (Lendl), a Stefan (Edberg) and a Stefano (Pescosolido), a whole bunch of Javiers and Diegos, a Dmitri or two, guys with “vons” or “vans” in their names, almost as many Sanchezes as the Barcelona phone book.

The women aren’t much different. The first five seeded players come from Germany, Yugoslavia, Argentina, Spain and the Dominican Republic.

It makes the World Series look parochial. It’s the greatest show in sports--even if you need headphones to understand it.